State of the Art: Art of the State – Group Exhibition of Photocopy Art – February 1987
State of the Art: Art of the State – Group Exhibition of Photocopy Art – February 1987 – A collaboration between Brisbane ARIs and the Fine Arts Society, UQ
Inspired by the influential 1987 Channel Four television documentary ‘State of the Art’ series that profiled the trends and currents in visual arts in the UK, Europe, USA and Australia in the 1980s this collaboration of artists working inside Brisbane Magandjin’s1980s vibrant artist-run ecology reactivated the Old Darnell Gallery located in the central tower of the Forgan Smith Building at the University of Queensland St. Lucia campus.
It was important for us to show there as it was a dead, ghostly and unwelcoming space on campus. We re-imagined this space and aimed to draw attention to the ‘origins’ of the UQ Art Collection just upstairs. Historically, the old John Darnell Gallery at the University of Queensland (UQ) laid the foundation for today’s UQ Art Collection, known as Queensland’s second-largest public art collection. Established in the 1940s via a generous £17,000 bequest, the Darnell Collection initially featured over 400 contemporary Australian works. Today, the collection has grown to over 2,500 pieces. The UQ art history department kindly facilitated this event.
We did this site re-activation through increased co-ordination efforts with artists and art history students who ran the Fine Arts Society at the University of Queensland. It was designed as a counter narrative to the then dominant narratives we felt disheartened by – media narratives in particular- about contemporary art, the hero artist, modernist non-collaborative approaches, the cult of celebrity and ‘the art star’ prevailing as dominant narratives about art in the media and elsewhere. We provided a collection of photocopy artworks articulating what truly mattered to young artists and SEQ ARIs in 1987. Expressions of current trends, knowledges, ideas and aspirations.
Typically, artist-run, queer spaces and DIY spaces rely on an “economy of means” based on social cooperation rather than pure profit. So this event also aimed to explore potential for non-profit arts-based forms – for example, experimental photocopy art formations – as types of “subjugated knowledges.” What we understood in that cultural moment as those informal, localised, and historically overlooked and snubbed expressions of expertise developed by DIY artist practitioners. Photocopy Art – or Xerox Art – was popular for artists and it wasn’t valued as art. For us it was inclusive, affordable, non-traditional and accessible as an essential part of this 1980s DIY and participatory economy of means. The Photocopy/Xerox machine then going through a leap of technological updates – scale, full colour, multiple imaging options and so on- was perceived as a critical tool for a more democratic print culture, ephemeral art making, zines, grassroots organising, and the then unfolding Eighties SEQ ARI subcultural movement where multimodality was increasingly embraced.
Over thirty artists were invited to participate with print culture, ephemeral practice and social practice modalities – to co-present A4 scale photocopy art works – responding to both the Channel Four series and current issues for artists living and working in Brisbane during the oppressive Bjelke-Petersen era. Oppositional culture was paramount at the time. No other documentation exists at the time of writing this post. This lack of documentation is common to queer, ephemeral and social sites . Especially for artists working independently and with enduring precarity in the pre-digital era. The afterlives of the SEQ ARI phenomenon as we understand it today is often told and transmitted through surviving examples of artists’ ephemera.
This archives image is a digital copy of the varied A3 photocopy posters designed by artist and playwright and artist-curator colleague Philip Dean to promote and publicise the exhibition distributed on campus, on community noticeboards which proliferated at the time throughout Brisbane City and inner-city suburbs. The aim of the photocopy art event was to both re-activate and re-imagine the Old Darnell Gallery into an artist-run space with increased potential for ARI uptake and to encourage dialogue and discussion about the state of political art and socially-engaged artmaking in Queensland at the time. Conversations between artists working in the Brisbane Magandjin CBD with artists and students situated on the St. Lucia university campus or co-creatives working with community-based 4ZZZ Public radio, also located on campus in the 1980s below the Refectory to ‘The Refec’ as it was commonly known.
While over thirty artists participated in the exhibition with ‘fine art’ students and 4ZZZ Collective members they response was enthusiastic and enthusiastically-received, the event was designed to be a constructive provocation as a one-off exhibition event.
Artist-Curator Paul Andrew
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